The Campaign Builder's Guild

try these steps in this order

open the terminal, run
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
for all the keyboard questions pretty much hit enter. if it asks for screen resolutions, set them. You'll have to restart X (the simplest way is to reboot).

If that doesn't work, or it doesn't ask about screen resolutions, try running krandrtray This will put an icon on your... desktop panel? it looks like a <---> at a 45 degree angle. Try clicking on that and seeing if you can change resolution there. You apparently may have to set font sizes and such. (Look for... settings, themes, something like that.)

I didn't see anything about resolutions with the first option, and the second option said that 800x600 was the highest possible, which is what it's been telling me...

Seems all the other distros I try allow different resolutions. Odd.

Anyway, I got a laptop for christmas. A used laptop. That hasn't had the drive defragged or checked for errors in... 5.6 years. It's running on Win98. I'm thinking of either keeping it for historical signifigance, or wiping the drive (four whole gigs of hard drive space!) clean and installing Linux on it. With the right distro, it might be able to squeeze out a bit of usefulness. I'm looking into DSL (I know, I dismissed it awhile ago, but it doesn't seem as bad as I thought it was), Puppy (not caring for the lack of auto-configuration at boot), and Feather (the best-looking option so far), but I haven't made a decision yet.

Hmm. I've been considering switching my laptop over to Linux from XP. Ultimately I want to eliminate dual boot (as quickly as possible really,) so long as I can run the few apps that are only available for Windows that I really want - most of my serious stuff is freeware that runs better under LInux anyway: Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.

My biggest concern is a smooth transition w/out any data loss of my files and hopefully an easy conversion of the apps (rebuilding all my add-ons to Firefox and OpenOffice manually would be a bitch. . .) Is Ubuntu doing this readily, and can it be done just with downloading the distro or do I need to have them send disks for the whole thing?

Unless you're dealing with virtualization, it really can't be done just by downloading, but yes, it can be done by downloading. What you download, in a way, is the disc, just not the physical plastic-n-shiny part of it. If you have a burner and some blank plastic-n-shinys, then you don't really need to have them send a disc, just have a burn program that allows you to burn "images" (of the disc, not drawings and photos). If this is too technical for you (I don't think that there's a member of this community who wouldn't be able to work out how to burn images), then you still have the option of requesting actual physical discs. You don't need to send them anything.


If pretty much everything you're using is open source anyway, I would think all you have to really do is just make backup copies of the files you want to save, then once you have Linux installed, transfer the files over to it. I can't say how well the add-ons will transfer, though. Maybe they'll be a bitch, maybe they'll go smoothly.

Um, why do you need a disk? Can't you simply install from the download if it's all there to begin with?

As far as I know, no. In my experience so far, operating systems install differently then other types of software. With, say, Open Office, you can find, download, install, and run the program all through, say, Windows. Unless you have a virtual machine, you can't run one OS through another like that (virtual machines seem to get around this only by tricking the OS into thinking it is on it's own computer). Near as I can tell, you can't install an OS through another, either-- or at least not with the same drive it's being installed on.

If this seems confusing at all, maybe somebody with more technical knowledge can explain it better, but simply, the download isn't an install file, but a digital "image" of the actual disc, which you will need. Hopefully this isn't too intimidating.

Not intimidating - my basic thought was that it would get installed onto the clean partition from the Windows - but it has to get downloaded into the Windows partition, which means running Windows to install it, or at least read it off the partition, hence the problem. Windows is capable of reading data it doesn't understand and writing it to disk - kind of like an actor reciting lines in a foreign language he doesn't understand and simply learned to repeat phonetically (or an American Buddhist chanting the Heart Sutra in Japanese. . .) The install disk would then be taking over, bypassing Windows and loading/running a bootstrap of the Linux OS (like an old hacker starting a box with his own boot disk in the drive, a keyboard error to go into setup and make the system boot from the floppy to bypass start-up security) which then runs itself to further install itself - makes sense if I sit and think about it for a bit.

Right, exactly. In fact, the install disc actually is a boot disc. Since it has to go on a blank drive/partition anyway, it seems to assume that there's nothing on the drive to boot from in the first place. In the case of Linux, it can also install a boot manager (like LILO or GRUB), just in case you wanted to try dual-booting.

On a sidenote, if you change your mind and decide to dual-boot, remember that Windows can't see the Linux partition (the file system, you see), but many distros of Linux can see the Windows partition. Turns out Bill Gates didn't see any marketable reason to support a competitor's formats, but most Linux software, being Free, doesn't have that sort of limitation.

Quote from: Snargash Moonclaw...(like an old hacker starting a box with his own boot disk in the drive, a keyboard error to go into setup and make the system boot from the floppy to bypass start-up security)...

Not that you're speaking from personal experience or anything here, right? :p

I may need to dual boot at first, but basically I want to port files from one partition to the other and expand the Linux partition into the old Windows partition as I go until it takes over completely.

Experience - only in crash recovery - when playing with settings in Command.com and Config.sys (usually memory management and trying to find a working load sequence of multiple TSRs that wouldn't play nice w/each other) it was pretty common to render the system inoperable when you would reboot to see how the changes worked. So you needed a boot disk w/a bare bones version of DOS (DRDOS was preferred over MS for tighter code and some useful, unique commands as well as general principals) along with some diagnostic and file tools from the old Norton Toolbox to reboot from and restore the backup versions of the modified files. These toolbox disks were almost identical to the ones used for less legitimate purposes. (I stacked mine using suggestions in "2600: The Hacker Quarterly," which appears to still be published. I wonder if it's still as good as it was then.) The techniques, of course, were essentially the same as well. . .

Quote from: Snargash MoonclawI may need to dual boot at first, but basically I want to port files from one partition to the other and expand the Linux partition into the old Windows partition as I go until it takes over completely.

You should be able to access your Windows partition from your Linux partition, so an easy way to transfer files would be to dual-boot (making both partitions about the same size), go into the Linux side, simply copy and paste any files you want, and resize the Linux partition to take up the entire drive.  You wouldn't need any external hard drive or disks and, depending on which distro you have, there should be a handy resizing utility that will do most of the work for you.

Quote from: Pair o' Dice Lost

Quote from: Snargash MoonclawI may need to dual boot at first, but basically I want to port files from one partition to the other and expand the Linux partition into the old Windows partition as I go until it takes over completely.

You should be able to access your Windows partition from your Linux partition, so an easy way to transfer files would be to dual-boot (making both partitions about the same size), go into the Linux side, simply copy and paste any files you want, and resize the Linux partition to take up the entire drive.  You wouldn't need any external hard drive or disks and, depending on which distro you have, there should be a handy resizing utility that will do most of the work for you.

I think he said he's going for Ubuntu, which comes with a very handy partitioning program (I forget the name both off the top of my head, but I know it's what my live partitioning disc uses, and I know it's a GNOME program). I think it needs to be coupled with NTFS support (at least, if you're editing a NTFS partition), though, and I forget off the top of my head if Ubuntu comes with that or not. I think it does, but if it doesn't, that might be a small issue.

Speaking of GNOME, I'd like to throw some advice out there for the new users: You may come to a point, eventually, where you have to choose what Desktop Environment you'll want. Microsoft makes that decision for Windows (if I'm not mistaken, I think Windows actually started out as a DE for DOS), and I think Apple might make it for MacOS, so it's possible you may never have had to make this decision before. The two main Desktop Environment are GNOME and KDE. While both have a high degree of reconfigurability, I think the default setup for KDE is much closer to Windows then the default setup for GNOME. You're obviously welcome (and even encouraged) to experiment with both, and decide for yourself which you prefer, but if you're a Windows user who simply wants as much instant familiarity with their DE as possible, KDE might be the way to go. There are countless other DEs, too, so don't feel like you have to be limited to these two. There's plenty of people who have decided they prefer Fluxbox, or XFCE, so there certainly seems to be reasons to like some of the Lesser Known DEs.

Quote from: Halfling FritosI think he said he's going for Ubuntu, which comes with a very handy partitioning program (I forget the name both off the top of my head, but I know it's what my live partitioning disc uses, and I know it's a GNOME program). I think it needs to be coupled with NTFS support (at least, if you're editing a NTFS partition), though, and I forget off the top of my head if Ubuntu comes with that or not. I think it does, but if it doesn't, that might be a small issue.

Speaking of GNOME, I'd like to throw some advice out there for the new users: You may come to a point, eventually, where you have to choose what Desktop Environment you'll want. Microsoft makes that decision for Windows (if I'm not mistaken, I think Windows actually started out as a DE for DOS), and I think Apple might make it for MacOS, so it's possible you may never have had to make this decision before. The two main Desktop Environment are GNOME and KDE. While both have a high degree of reconfigurability, I think the default setup for KDE is much closer to Windows then the default setup for GNOME. You're obviously welcome (and even encouraged) to experiment with both, and decide for yourself which you prefer, but if you're a Windows user who simply wants as much instant familiarity with their DE as possible, KDE might be the way to go. There are countless other DEs, too, so don't feel like you have to be limited to these two. There's plenty of people who have decided they prefer Fluxbox, or XFCE, so there certainly seems to be reasons to like some of the Lesser Known DEs.
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Also, there are versions of Ubuntu like Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. that either have put their own twist on existing DEs or have made entirely new ones, so if your interface is a priority, you might want to look into one of those versions.

i figured out how to get Kubuntu to the full resolution in Virtualbox. Turns out, there's an ISO file that comes with Virtualbox that allows better host/guest integration called Guest Additions. All I really had to do was unmount the current CD drive, mount the Guest Additions ISO as a drive, and run the installation file in BASH.

If anybody needs more details for this process, I found out about it here, along with some info on Guest Additions.

Problem: I have Damn Small installed on that laptop I mentioned getting for Christmas, but I can't figure out how to use NDISWrapper to get my wireless card working. My card is a Linksys wpc11 v4, and I have the driver files in /home/dsl/Linksys Drivers/[some weird folder name]/.

What am I supposed to do from here?

Edit-- by the way, the machine is an i586, if that helps at all.